To finalize Wasp's Launch Week #2, we held our second Hackathon. Just like the "Betathon" before it, it was an open hackathon where the only requirement was to build something cool with Wasp!
In this post, I’ll give a quick overview of:
- the hackathon results 🏆
- how the hackathon was organized
- how we promoted it
- the community response
…and the Winners Are:
What’s a hackathon without the participants!? Let’s get this post off to a proper start by congratulating our winners and showcasing their work. 🔍
🥇 Typergotchi
Our unofficial mascot, Da Boi, makes his debut app appearance in this fun, feature-rich typing game!
- View the App & GitHub Repo
- Follow Umbrien and kg04ls
- 🎉 Prizes: Wasp-colored Mechanical Keyboard, Wasp swag
“Wasp makes building fullstack apps fast and fun. We've done lots of hackthons in the past, and we couldn't pass up the chance to win a mechanical keyboard :)” - Umbrien & kg04ls
🥈 Office Wars
A turn-based, multi-player strategy game where you command your tank across a hexagonal map. A great way to keep your coworkers engaged while you wait for your code to compile!
- View the App & GitHub Repo
- Follow Roland & Luís
- 🎉 Prizes: Some personalized gifts from the Wasp team, and Wasp swag
“We love how Wasp brings the tools that are already being used by developers under the same umbrella. It's very streamlined and makes building fullstack apps easy to accomplish... like django but w/ more superpowers” - Roland & Luís
🥉 Tied for Third: Bee Pretty & StorAI
- View the Bee Pretty GitHub Repo
- Follow mkinkela1
- View StorAI & its GitHub Repo
- Follow Kikketer
- 🎉 Prizes: Wasp Swag
After 5 minutes of working with Wasp I thought, this is phenomenal! So much just works out of the box -- everything was flawless" - mkinkela1
🥳 And A Big Round of Applause for the Rest of the Participants!
Thanks so much to rest of the participants:
- Max for submitting Feedback Hub, which we award "the most SaaS-y app".
- Richard for submitting Promise, for winning the "best last-minute minimal-effort submission" award.
- Swarnavo for submitting his Dashboard Panel app.
Hackathon How-to
For our first hackathon, the "Betathon", we announced and started it on the final day of our launch week. Looking back, this probably wasn't the best approach because it didn't give people much time to prepare. This time around, we announced the hackathon a week in advance, giving people a bit more time to prepare their projects.
And just like last time, we kept the Hackathon rules simple: no categories, no constraints, just 10 days to create any fullstack web app using Wasp, alone or in a team of up to 4 people.
We may be a bit unoriginal here, but we also decided to offer the same grand prize as the Betathon: a Wasp-colored mechanical keyboard. On top of that, runner-ups also got some project-related prizes, as well as Wasp beanies, shirts, and other swag. Of course, we also spotlight the winner’s on our social media accounts.
Something new we did this time was hold a post-hackathon presentation event on Discord, thanks to a suggestion made by Max, one of our most dedicated contributers. We gave each team a chance to present their projects and talk a bit about their experience. The turnout was great, with almost all the teams participating, and it helped us to get to know the faces behind the apps. Not only was this a great way to connect more with our community, but it also gave us some insight into where are users are coming from, what they're interested in, and what they're looking for in Wasp.
Promotion
As of late, we've made an effort to promote exemplary apps built with Wasp, as well as create some of our own. This has been a great way to show off Wasp's capabilities, and has resulted in a noticeable increase in interest and traffic. Therefore, for the Hackathon, we let the organic interest in Wasp be the driver for the Hackathon, as we didn't do much promotion outside of our own channels, nor did we partner with any other sponsors this time. We simply announced the Hackathon and directed people to our Hacakthon homepage we created.
The hackathon page is nice to have as a central spot for all the rules and relevant info. We also added a fun intro video using AI-generated narration of a possibly well-known actor 😎. Overall, the effort put into the homepage gives participants the feeling that they’re entering into a serious contest and committing to something of substance, while the light-heartedness of the promotion material lets them know that it's more about fun than serious prizes. But even in the abscence of big winnings, the quality of the submissions were suprisingly high. Intrinsic motivation, ftw! 🤩
Again, just like we did previously, we wrote the Hackathon Homepage with Wasp, and put the source code up on our GitHub. We thought it might inspire people to build with Wasp, using it as a guide while creating their own projects for the hackathon, plus it could be used by others in the future if they want to host their own hackathon. 💻
The Response 2.0
We were really pleased to see the response to the Hackathon surpass our expectations, yet again. The number, quality, and creativity of the submissions were even better than the Betathon. We also had a lot of fun interacting with the participants, and we're looking forward to doing it again soon.
It's reaffirming to see Wasp grow along with our community, as they build more and more cool stuff with it. Events like this give us a morale and confidence boost as it confirms that we're building something the community wants.
Thanks so much again to the participants for their hard work and contributions. We're grateful and happy to have you along for the ride! 🐝🚀